NOT SO FAST – State Rep. Matt Patrick calls for a second look at large-scale sewering on the Cape during a forum on alternative distributed wastewater treatment systems Dec. 5 in Mashpee.

Speakers tout alternatives to wide-scale sewering

The speakers at a Dec. 5 forum on “Rethinking Sewers on Cape Cod” had a message for the Town of Chatham: Whoa!

Chatham’s decision to sewer most of the community, some said, could be a costly overreaction to a wastewater treatment problem solved “better, faster, and cheaper” by clusters of alternative and innovative systems.

State Rep. Matt Patrick, who hosted the event at the Mashpee Senior Center, called the state’s push for nitrogen removal from estuaries “the largest unfunded government mandate in history,” likely to cost “hundreds of millions of dollars for the largest towns like Barnstable and Falmouth and billions of dollars for Cape Cod.”

Recognizing that the region’s ponds and estuaries “need to be cleaned up,” the Falmouth Democrat said, “It’s important that we do this clean-up as cost-effectively as we can. So far I haven’t seen that. I haven’t seen anyone show me that we can’t use some of the alternative systems.”

“The leading edge of water and wastewater management understands that the sewer approach is not sustainable into the future,” said former Gloucester city councilor Valerie Nelson, director of the Coalition for Alternative Wastewater Treatment. “If you get a second chance to look on Cape Cod, you might join that leading edge.”

Things got especially edgy when Nelson offered figures suggesting that a decentralized system could cut Chatham’s expected per-household expenditure on a centralized sewer system in half, and remained so when Jim Kreissl, a retired member of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s office of research and development, joined the fray.

Kreissl, a senior environmental consultant with Tetra Tech, said Chatham planned to “jam effluent (wastewater) into the soil at four times the acceptable rate” and that the effluent would remain high in nitrogen as it passed toward a sub-embayment. “They chose not to disinfect the effluent.”

Wrong, said Dr. Robert Duncanson, Chatham’s director of health and environment, during a question-and-answer segment. “We are disinfecting,” he said. As for “jamming” effluent, he said, the loading rate was based on extensive study by the Cape Cod Commission, the town, the U.S. Geological Service, and the state Department of Environmental Protection, and had been approved by the DEP.

Duncanson indicated that the figures Nelson used for the cost of Chatham’s sewer plan were inflated.

Cost was a major consideration at Saturday’s meeting, but several speakers made reference to “the triple bottom line” of environmental integrity, social equity, and economic reality. They argued that decentralized systems were a more effective way to satisfy that trio of criteria than centralized sewers.

Kreissl said decentralized systems have lower capital costs, treating water where it is and not shipping it off for handling elsewhere. Keeping the water in the local system avoids draining the water table, he said, as has been reported in communities around Boston that are members of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

The knock on decentralized systems is that they can’t remove nitrogen to the point of satisfying the TMDL (total maximum daily loads) the state is setting for Massachusetts embayments. A study of alternative and innovative systems at the county’s testing site found those A/I systems were not fully effective in that role.

One purpose of Saturday’s meeting was to hear from practitioners in the A/I field who are getting good results in nitrogen removal. Craig Goodwin of Northwest Cascade said his company’s decentralized cluster systems can design, build and operate systems that will do the job, including use of membrane bioreactors that can reduce nitrogen levels to 3 to 5 milligrams per liter.

David Cotton of Orenco Systems, Inc. and Wastewater Technologies, Inc., touted his companies’ directional boring system, which he said is much less disruptive to a community than traditional trench-digging for sewers. He said the systems can be designed to address “hot spots” for nitrogen removal in a targeted way that avoids construction of a town-encompassing system while still accomplishing the community’s goals.

Craig Lindell of Aquapoint spoke of the town of Piperton, TN, which developed its treatment infrastructure by requiring developers to build same and transfer it to the community upon completion. The advantage for builders, he said, was increased density with reduced infrastructure costs, and the town has gained additional revenue through increased property taxes.

His point? “Piperton tried to adapt infrastructure to their community instead of the other way around. It used its zoning, variances and the sewer ordinances as assets to be leveraged instead of as restrictions to be enforced.”

Speaking on achieving TMDL levels with cluster systems, Pio Lomobardo of Lombardo Associates said his company’s denitrification filters can be part of the answer. His plan for a decentralized Nitrex-based system for Mashpee’s embayments is going forward, he said, and will provide benefits faster than a centralized sewer system.

“It’s 20 years to build the system, and 20 years to flush it out,” he said of conventional sewers. “I think Cape people would want to see results a little quicker.”

[On Dec. 8, DEP Commissioner Laurie Burt wrote to Patrick that she and her staff “are in favor of the use of the Nitrex Barrier technology on a pilot basis at an appropriate location that doesn’t require Department oversight or approval” as discussed at a meeting earlier this year at Waquoit Bay in Falmouth. Elsewhere in the letter, Burt noted that Patrick had inquired about the possibility of employing the barrier “at a test site in the town of Orleans.”]

Creative options should be considered, Nelson said, raising “the idea of nutrient recovery” for use as fertilizer instead of the current oil-based versions. “My hope for Cape Cod,” she said, “if you can get a timeout down here, there’s a wealth of new technology.”

Emphasizing the theme of taking a second look, Goodwin said, “I challenge you. Do the analysis.”